ADDED VALUE

ADDED VALUE; A Whistle-Blower's All-Too-Familiar Story

By JONATHAN D. GLATER

Published: March 23, 2003

SHERRON S. WATKINS was one of the few people inside Enron who voiced concern about its accounting when many others at the company were content to be yes men.

The story of how she negotiated her years as an accountant at Enron, -- how she tried to decipher the byzantine financial deals that hid hundreds of millions of dollars of corporate debt and how she tried to draw attention to their potentially devastating consequences -- would be a fascinating one.

''Power Failure: The Inside Story of the Collapse of Enron'' (Doubleday, $26), by Mimi Swartz with Ms. Watkins, tries to do more with less; only the last 80 pages or so describe the effort to understand and later to undo the financial games played by top Enron executives.

The first 280 pages contain vignettes about Enron executives and their habits, observations of its corporate culture (''almost everyone who got ahead at Enron was short'') and broad generalizations about the state of corporate America and even the world. Instead of telling a cautionary tale of corporate greed, Ms. Swartz has provided a cautionary tale for future tellers of cautionary tales.

The book is full of observations that will be familiar to anyone who read newspaper articles chronicling Enron's collapse. The company, she tells us, fostered a winner-take-all culture of risk taking (''at Enron, being ordinary was the kiss of death, and being a star -- rich, smart and free -- was everything'') that emphasized meeting financial goals above all. It was led by ambitious men who appear to have strikingly similar backgrounds, growing up with hardship and nevertheless rising to the top, and at a time when celebrity executives could do no wrong.

The vignettes -- about company parties and their skits, descriptions of office décor and the like -- offer a surface view of life at Enron, but they do not make the people of Enron seem real. Not until halfway through the book do some of the now-infamous off-balance-sheet partnerships, with names like LJM2 and Chewco, appear.

Dates are sprinkled throughout the book, but the chronology is unclear and the story somewhat hard to follow. Because the individual chapters and subchapters read as self-contained magazine articles, it is difficult to follow the chain of events that led to Enron's bankruptcy filing in December 2001. Only in the final pages, covering the period from August 2001, when Ms. Watkins took her accounting concerns to Kenneth L. Lay, then the company's chief executive, does the book create some excitement.

Maybe, after several years have passed, the pages of slick observations of the business culture of the late 1990's, both inside and outside Enron, will be interesting and informative to a new set of readers. (A sample: ''Getting very rich seemed less and less irrational as a goal; people who weren't millionaires, in fact, started to look like drones with no ambition, or worse, chumps.'') Today, though, the boom is still fresh in memory, even if it feels as though it occurred a lifetime ago.